English

Noun

counterstroke ‎(plural counterstrokes)

1. A blow given in return.
   • 1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, V.11:

     He met him with a counterstroke so swift, / That quite smit off his arme as he it up did lift.

2. A retaliation.
   • 1914, Various, New York Times Current History= The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2:

     The declaration of the Allied Governments that they will not conclude peace separately during the war or demand terms of peace without previous agreement with each other is an opportune counterstroke to the campaign initiated by Germany for the purpose of detaching France from Russia and especially from Britain.

   • 1916, Bertrand W. Sinclair, Big Timber:

     She could understand how a man like Monohan would hate a man like Jack Fyfe, would nurse and feed on the venom of his hate until setting a torch to Fyfe's timber would be a likely enough counterstroke.

   • 1947, Garrett Putnam Serviss, Edison's Conquest of Mars:

     May 1947 EDISON'S CONQUEST OF MARS CHAPTER ONE "LET US GO TO MARS" It is impossible that the stupendous events which followed the disastrous invasion of the earth by the Martians should go without record, and circumstances having placed the facts at my disposal, I deem it a duty, both to posterity and to those who were witnesses of and participants in the avenging counterstroke that the earth dealt back at its ruthless enemy in the heavens, to write down the story in a connected form.